How to fight California’s wildfires? It’s an “all of the above” respond.

There might, indeed, be a need to make it easier to thin dying or dead trees out of thickly forested areas, reducing the fuel for wildfires. But the problem is actually more complicated. Even if dead trees are removed, the dry bushes act like kindling(引火物) when wildfires spread.

Even more to the point, thick forests were not a factor in these recent California’s fires. “They’re using these fires to talk about forest management that has nothing to do with the landscape in which the fires are occurring,” says Chur Miller. W. M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History at Pomona College in Claremont, California.

Climate change is making wildfires worse. The resulting unpredictable weather patterns have created shorter, wetter winters in California, producing a sudden, heavy growth of brushes, grasses and trees. After winter, the state’s ongoing drought and record-high summer temperatures draw water out of the plants, making them near-perfect kindling. With the hot and dry Santa Ana winds of fall, fires explode out of control.

Yet these tragedies can’t be blamed only on global warming. Wildfires are actually a vital of the state’s ecosystem. Lodgepole pines (松树), for example, grow well in fire-prone areas where millions of structures have been built in rural areas of California since the 1940s. When they burn, the cost in lives and treasures skyrockets.

Answering these disasters with a one-dimensional solution helps no one, although it might score short-term political points. The proper response includes placing limits on residential expansion into wildlands; better management and removal of dry brushes and continuously addressing the growing concern of climate changes.

In other words, the solution isn’t either/or. It’s all of the above.

Alone on a barren island, Ding Peng and his colleagues bring the Chinese crested tern (凤头燕鸥) back from the edge of extinction. From time to time, Ding Peng makes his way across the waves to Zhongtiedun, an island that dots the vast East China Sea.

Born in Lanzhou, capital of Northwest China’s Gansu Province, Ding grew up seeing bare mountains and sandstorms, and had an early awareness of environmental protection.

In March 2013, Ding landed on Zhongtiedun with more than 30 experts to choose a breeding (繁育) area for Chinese crested terns. They wanted to restore their populations through manual intervention (人工干预).

At the beginning, there were no Chinese crested terns on Zhongtiedun and Ding’s first cask was to attract the birds to settle there. Their breeding period is usually from May to August, and they like to lay their eggs on small islands with little tree cover, so Ding and the team of experts settled on relatively flat Zhongtiedun. They also cut away the taller bushes, while 400 fake birds of the same size as Chinese crested terns were placed there, with a bird sound playback system installed to simulate the sound of courtship (求偶).

However, they were unable to attract any of the birds over the following two months. “The experts suggested withdrawing the equipment and making plans for the next year,” Ding recalls. Ding proposed the equipment that had been installed on the island not be taken down. Two days later, the team got what they wished for—several Chinese crested terns were found among the group of great crested terns flying in the sky.

“Though the life on the island is tough, things took a turn for the better in 2017, when more volunteers came to join the bird protection team. Everything was worth it. Now that more people are aware of the importance of protecting the birds, and now that their numbers are on the rise,” Ding says.

At the World Economic Forum last month, President Trump drew claps when he announced the United States would respond to the forum's proposal to plant one trillion(万亿) trees to fight climate change. The trillion-tree idea won wide attention last summer after a study published in the journal Science concluded that planting so many trees was “the most effective climate change solution to date”.

If only it were true. But it isn't. Planting trees would slow down the planet's warming, but the only thing that will save us and future generations from paying a huge price in dollars, lives and damage to nature is rapid and considerable reductions in carbon release from fossil fuels, to net zero by 2050.

Focusing on trees as the big solution to climate change is a dangerous diversion(偏离). Worse still, it takes attention away from those responsible for the carbon release that are pushing us toward disaster. For example, in the Netherlands, you can pay Shell an additional 1 euro cent for each liter of regular gasoline you put in your tank, to plant trees to balance the carbon release from your driving. That's clearly no more than disaster slightly delayed. The only way to stop this planet from overheating is through political, economic, technological and social solutions that end the use of fossil fuels.

There is no way that planting trees, even across a global area the size of the United States, can absorb the huge amounts of fossil carbon released from industrial societies. Trees do take up carbon from the atmosphere as they grow. But this uptake merely replaces carbon lost when forests were cleared in the first place, usually long ago. Regrowing forests where they once grew can undo some damage done in the past, but even a trillion trees can't store enough carbon to head off dramatic climate changes this century.

In a sharp counter argument to last summer's Paper in Science, Justin Gillis wrote in the same journal in October that the study's findings were inconsistent with the dynamics of the global carbon cycle. He warned that “the claim that global tree restoration(复原) is our most effective climate solution is simply scientifically incorrect and dangerously misleading”.